Michel Foucault: Studies of Power and Sport

Abstract

As a historian of the present, Michel Foucault sought to undermine modern vernaculars by disrupting the certainties that govern contemporary ways of thinking. Foucault’s interventions encourage us to detach from established knowledge, ask fresh questions, make new connections, and understand why it is important to do so. Given Foucault’s generative role in intellectual thought — evidenced most especially by extensive citation and frequent discussion of his work — serious scholars of sport cannot avoid Foucault’s formulations. Indeed, an increasing number of academics studying sport have turned to Foucault to “think through” sport’s relevance on the one hand, and for rethinking what is relevant to their work on the other. Correlatively, scholars who once imagined sport to be distinct and distant from their domain of study are, because of Foucauldian styles of thinking, now sensitive to sport’s significance to their own work.

If power were never anything by repressive, if it never did anything but say no, do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power so good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it produces and traverses things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, produces discourses. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose focus is repression.

(Foucault, 1980, p. 119)